"Presentations at scientific conferences provide self-evident benefits -- they are venues for disseminating research findings, becoming known in science, and networking with colleagues who can enable future professional opportunities," wrote Casadevall and Handelsman -- who was nominated last summer as associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. But the benefits go further, they noted: Tenure and promotion committees consider such invitations, for example, and speakers provide role models for women at early stages of their careers.

"Analysis of 460 symposia involving 1,845 speakers in two large meetings sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology revealed that having at least one woman member of the convening team correlated with a significantly higher proportion of invited female speakers and reduced the likelihood of an all-male symposium roster. Our results suggest that inclusion of more women as conveners may increase the proportion of women among invited speakers at scientific meetings."

Specifically, among 244 sessions at ICAAC from 2011-2013, "145 were convened by male-only convener teams, and 99 had at least one female in the convener team." They found that "inclusion of at least one woman in the convening team was associated with 72% more female-invited speakers than symposia organized by all-male teams. Inclusion of at least one woman in the convening team significantly reduced the number of sessions with all-male rosters. In 2013, almost half of the sessions organized by all-male convener teams included only men in the speaker roster."

But Stemwedel told me by email that solving the problem may be more complex than simply involving more women in organizing conferences, because it's not entirely clear why women conveners were linked to having more women speakers:

"I think the authors are quite right to note that implicit gender bias infects the judgments of women scientists as well as those of their male colleagues -- which means that effective responses that overcome the bias in putting together panels at professional meetings aren't just a matter of having female conveners who are presumed not to labor under the burden of such biases."

Women, the Casadevall and Handelsman argue, may place a higher premium on diversity when they put together sessions, making good representation a selection criterion. "Indeed, this is one of the recommendations the authors suggest as worth trying," Stemwedel continued, "and while I think it's an empirical question whether that would fully address the problem, I think it's at least plausible that a diversity criterion might be a useful workaround for the blind spot implicit gender bias imposes when people think on people in their field doing good and important work."

But there's at least one other possible explanation, Stemwedel said, that reinforces the idea that having women conveners would help. Women, she said, "are likely to know more women in their field (including those doing good and important work) than their male colleagues do." That could mean that "if you were to sit down a sample of males and females at the same career stage in a scientific field and ask them to make a list of women in that field, the women would hand you significantly longer lists than the men would. That in itself -- a wider range of women who could be asked -- strikes me as likely to be involved in the causal explanation for how having a woman on the convening team leads to more women in the session. And maybe that means that simply making sure the convening teams have lots of women will ensure that more women are on the radar when conference programs are built."